TV Playbook: ''Let's Add a Kid!''

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A look at a classic television cliche: the new, cute kid.

By Jonah Krakow

Kids are great, aren't they? With their missing teeth and sideways baseball caps and saying embarrassing things at inopportune moments? Yes, everyone loves an adorable little kid, which is why networks are always gung ho about adding one (or two) to a TV family in the final seasons of a show. Of course, the cruel truth is that most of these shows already have a little kid in the cast, but just like cars, iPods, and Terminator models, eventually they became obsolete. Only years later, the dark days of puberty long behind, do those discarded child actors reach the promised land again, finding work as sarcastic talking heads on VH1 clip shows.

Adding a kid in the last few seasons is a classic TV cliché that has weaved its way into storylines for decades and is widely accepted as a last ditch effort to save a dying show. The amazing thing is that even though this hacky premise has been used for years, its record of success is spotty. The purpose of the article isn't to qualify whether or not adding a kid caused these shows to jump the shark (there's a good website you should check out in order to determine that) because some shows were able to successfully live on for years afterwards. Rather, the purpose is to show the creative ways that television shows handled this all too-popular cliché.

There's a big difference between adding a kid and adding a baby to a television show. We're going to deal with kids, not babies, so don't start crying because you don't see Friends, Moonlighting or The X-Files on this list. Some shows pulled double duty: doing a pregnancy storyline as well as magically aging the youngster into a walking, talking, punchline-delivery machine the next season and we'll cover those shows as well.

The crack research staff hidden in the bowels of the IGN fortress informs us that despite popular belief, I Love Lucy was not the first show to have an on-screen pregnancy (a show called Mary Kay and Johnny wins the prize). Regardless, Lucy's storyline was hugely popular and the actress' TV pregnancy coincided with her real-life pregnancy in 1953. On an episode in season two, a pregnant Lucy goes to the hospital and gives birth to Little Ricky, (aptly titled: "Lucy Goes to the Hospital").

However, once born, Little Ricky wasn't featured in many episodes over the next few seasons, probably because he couldn't do much more than eat, sleep and cry. For years, the Ricardo's and the Mertz's had a lot of on-screen adventures without Little Ricky bogging them down, (including a trip to California) but he finally made his first talking appearance in season six, the show's penultimate season. Given his birth in season two and the show's continued focus on the four main adult characters, it's difficult to call the addition of Little Ricky an egregious attempt to prolong the show.

We're not going to cut Family Ties the same slack. Years before Tina Yothers was on Celebrity Fit Club and Brian Bonsall was running from the law, they both spent time as the youngest member of the Keaton family. In season three, when America was tired of Jennifer's long blonde locks, they dropped the pregnancy bomb and proved once again that all the LSD the Keatons took in the '60s didn't hamper their ability to procreate.

Using a device commonly known as "SORAS", (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome), little Andy defied the laws of God, man and nature and turned four years-old in season five, (a jump of four years in a span of two.) It's questionable whether or not the show needed to add another child. The Keaton house was already crowded and many of the scripts were geared towards the show's breakout star, Michael J. Fox, who played Alex Keaton. Nevertheless, toddler-Andy hung around for two more years, seemingly for the express purpose of having Alex turn him into a Young Republican until the show was cancelled in season seven.

Maybe everyone was high on cocaine. Maybe they thought Robin Williams was talented and crazy enough to pull it off. Or maybe the network was desperate to recover the huge ratings the show had received its first season and they were willing to try anything. Regardless, in the show's fourth and final season, Mork & Mindy added a kid.

Of course, it being a show about an alien, this wasn't your garden-variety pregnancy. On Ork, (the planet that Mork was from), the processes of birth and aging were done in reverse, so instead of Mindy popping out a baby, Mork laid an egg and a "kid" named Mearth was hatched in the form of older actor/comedian Jonathan Winters. This decision did two things: it gave the writers new stories to tell and it addressed the problems of a newborn's inability to read cue cards. Unfortunately, audiences didn't take kindly to no Hollywood types messin' with our traditional 'Merican values of the women-folk doing the birthing and the show was cancelled soon afterwards.